Ships to Wreck: Petar Zoranić Collided with World Harmony in the Bosphorus

Authors : Utku Can Akın, Mustafa Türkan

Pages : 29-49

Doi:10.53979/yillik.1691701

View : 1276 | Download : 946

Publication Date : 2025-12-30

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :On 14 December 1960 the tankers Petar Zoranić and World Harmony collided in the Bosphorus, creating a multi-layered disaster whose legal, political, and cultural reverberations far exceeded a routine maritime mishap. Rather than limiting the incident to a navigational error, this article examines the interplay of the Strait’s complex geomorphology, human negligence, the Montreux Convention’s principle of free passage, and the chronic shortage of maritime pilots. Drawing on autopoietic (self-producing) systems theory, it shows how the subsystems that responded to the collision (law, politics, media, and local memory) processed the event through their own codes and largely ignored one another. The legal system addressed liability and compensation, the political sphere debated public safety and the Straits regime, the media circulated sensational imagery, and local memory absorbed trauma. These parallel reactions reduced a potentially transformative moment to an aestheticized narrative in both crisis management and cultural production. The study argues that “disaster” in Ottoman–Turkish historiography should not be confined to nature-centered templates such as earthquakes, fires, or floods; maritime accidents in strategic corridors like the Bosphorus require a multidimensional reading within a nature–society–power nexus. It further contends that unhistoricized disasters such as the Petar Zoranić–World Harmony collision risk fading into a mere “background hum,” and calls for interpretations that view catastrophe as generative as well as destructive. Finally, it maintains that the integrated use of written archives, oral testimony, photographic and cinematic material, and legal documents can move scholarship beyond romantic anecdotes toward a more systematic and critical collective memory.
Keywords : İstanbul Boğazı, Petar Zoranić–World Harmony kazası, deniz kazaları, afet tarihi, yıkıntı estetiği

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